I Fell in Love with Hope(91)

henry





BEFORE


I don’t know what love is.

Some say it has two forms. It can be roaring and passionate. It swallows you, consumes you, the other person a source of breathing. Like a violent flame that burns out in a single night.

Love can also be gentle, subtle. A wave washing into shore on a quiet afternoon. It settles over you like an ocean, till you become comfortable with the tide.

Sam has taken to calling me, my love. It started as a phrase of endearment, the kind he would whisper when we kissed in closets or under tables.

Kissing Sam is addicting. For someone who feels like an intruder in their own body, it is connection given an act. It makes me feel like I belong. Like I belong with him.

“My love, tell me things,” he says.

“What kind of things?” I ask.

“Anything. I want to hear you.”

“You taste like medicine,” I say, and he smiles, his teeth against my lips. It is, perhaps, my favorite feeling in the world.

Sam and I sleep in his bed. His legs tangle with mine as the dark rolls over the light. His head rests against my chest, drowsiness humming through him, the sheets tucked right up to his chin. Before he falls asleep, he traces my cheekbone with two fingers and asks, “What do you dream of, my love?”

“I don’t think I can dream,” I tell him.

“Everyone dreams,” he says. “I dream of you and me sailing across the ocean, and seeing the world.”

“The whole world?” I ask.

“Every corner of it.” The sheets ruffle as he shifts. “What do you dream of, my sweet Sam?”

I think, reveling in the feeling of Sam’s lips laying affections on my neck.

“I dream of this,” I say. Sam’s curiosity looks at me through his lashes. “I dream of you and I like this, together, tomorrow, and every tomorrow after that.”

“My love,” Sam says like it’s a statement of its own, a kiss that’s spoken rather than had. “All my tomorrows are yours.”

—





Sam stretches his neck back against the table, blowing out his breath as the doctors untie his gown. He lays horizontally, an object of examination. Sam has marks on his body, patches that rise above the skin. They crack and bleed in the cold. They become sore and raw when he bathes.

The men surrounding him talk to each other as if Sam isn’t there. They are his mechanics, and his engine needs tending to. Their hands run over his screws and bolts, picking out inconsistencies and mulling over how to remedy them.

I sit across the room. The doctors obstruct my view of him, like a kettle of white vultures. His face is all that’s visible, or rather, a disconnected version of it. Like I do, Sam attempts to look at himself from another point of view. The ceiling, the walls, some inanimate part of the room he used to give a soul.

Being naked, poked, and prodded at–none of it is strange to Sam. He’s undergone the routine since he was little. It’s a norm. But the shame never goes away, he says. It isn’t a logical thing to feel, yet he does. He feels exposed, leered at, vulnerable.

Working on a swallow, Sam eventually looks to me. I smile as if it could make any of this easier for him. Sam sticks his tongue out. I frown. He holds in a laugh, his lips twisting.

Once the exam is over, he sits up, and covers himself, muscles shaky.

I run to his side.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Yes, my love,” he says. He kisses my nose. “I’m in the mood for a laugh, aren’t you? Let’s go play cards with Henry.”

“Okay,” I agree, helping him off the table and back into his clothes.

—

Children who experience illness can harden. It isn’t a response to pain, it’s a response to their life feeling stretched, thinned into a cycle. Memories blur into each other. A year in hospital can feel like ten. Maybe that’s why so many patients have the wisdom of an old man and the temper of a child.

Henry tells me that war is a lot like being sick. There’s a sense of will I make it out of this or won’t I. A lot of pain, a lot of boredom, and camaraderie among the hurt and bored.

Henry tells me he remembers the exact weight of his rifle and how odd it felt in his arms as he ran with a bouncing pack on his back. The air was nearly black, he says, full of smog so thick you could feel the tar in your lungs. The sirens and ammunition shot through his eardrums about as harshly as the blood stank.

The shadows he trudged through hold on to his memory like a bump in an otherwise flat road. He turns to me, his head limp on the pillow. Then, he asks if that’s what dying feels like. Running into the dark, not knowing whether light exists on the other side.

Henry faces his pipe again. He caresses the mouthpiece, looking across the room as if another cot sits beside his, a neighboring soul under the covers.

He speaks to the air, to that little ghost he keeps handy. He mumbles things I can’t quite make out, something about I remember, and almost, and I’ll be there soon.

I wait till Henry is asleep before I go see Sam. He’s reading a book, one of his hands in a fist as blood slowly drained from his arm and into a bag.

The patches on his skin sting against the cold air, cracking and bleeding, making him wince. A layer of gray and purple shrouded his eyes. I crawled into the bed with him and ask about his day.